Topic Name

Paras Gupta, IIT Gandhinagar, gupta.paras@iitgn.ac.in

Krishnam Hasija, IIT Gandhinagar, krishnam.h@iitgn.ac.in

Shreyshi Singh, IIT Gandhinagar, shreyshi.s@iitgn.ac.in

Kanishk Singh, IIT Gandhinagar, kanishk.s@iitgn.ac.in

Repo

Covid-19 Vaccination drives around the world

The unexpected onset of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic stirred up chaos in the entire world as it rapidly spread to every corner of the world. Vigilant and proactive countries could slow their growth and assuage the damage done, while countries with incompetent governments and inadequate measures suffered miserably. Regardless, the only hopeful solution to the pandemic was the rollout of effective vaccines. This document outlines the process and effect of vaccination campaigns throughout the world; analyzes data regarding mortality rates, number of active cases, vaccination numbers, human development index, and several others to compile and compare these numbers into coherent plots that show how the world is faring.

In January 2021, India issued its first-ever dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. Then, along with the world, India set out on its journey of what became agreeably one of the most extensive vaccination drives. According to the data, the total number of ]vaccinations issued worldwide is more than 9 Billion. The rapid evolution of effective vaccines is an astounding achievement. Along with the development of vaccines, the reach of these vaccines in terms of usage has increased rapidly as well. Despite the production and distribution being covered by most of the population in many countries, the demand for vaccines is still proliferating.

From the above data, we can see that the number of people vaccinated worldwide, more than 65 percent belongs to Asia. The density of people vaccinated is the highest in Europe. Not a massive set of countries have managed to have a vaccination drive of more than 2 Million per density. Amongst these, the density of vaccination in India remains at 1.2 Million. The Vaccination amongst the the countries in each continent is also not very consistent.

New Covid-19 cases vs new tests

It goes without saying that adequate testing is required to discover the number of active COVID-19 cases, which directly measures how much of a threat the virus poses. Following are the inferences are drawn from the data on how the number of cases recorded stand about the number of tests done in five different countries across the socio-economic spectrum. All countries followed the natural pattern where the number of cases followed a curve equivalent to that of the number of tests done. Some oddities and highlights that stood out are mentioned ahead. In June 2021, India experienced a spike in the number of tests, jumping from 2M to 3.6M, but it didn’t affect the number of cases. After this spike, the number of tests became more inconsistent than before, deviating around a million from the average. In January 2022, the United States experienced a significant increase in the number of cases as the number of tests done were increased. As exhibited by the spikes, Brazil had regular mass testing drives each month, but the number of cases remained relatively steady regardless (40,000 - 70,000). The number of tests in Morocco was widely deviating relative to the population. As a thumb rule, the number of cases appeared to be 1/5th of the number of tests done which is much more concerning than the situation in other countries. Similar to the United States, France exhibited a high deviation in the number of tests reaching up to 2 million from the average. The number of cases remained relatively low initially, only to rise with the number of tests from December 2021 to January 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many deaths ever since its beginning. Even with multiple vaccines, it has been an uphill battle to subside the mortality rate. Before the pharmaceuticals started distributing vaccines, the number of weekly deaths ranged from 700 to 8000 (from September 2020 to March 2021). Ironically, the mortality rate hit an all-time low, dropping below 1000, just before the vaccines hit the market and started rising again. With around 47,000 people already vaccinated with the first dose, the second dose of vaccination was introduced in April 2021. Halfway through April 2021, vaccination rates suddenly hit a valley, causing weekly deaths to skyrocket (> 10,000). Even though vaccination rates increased significantly after this (especially the second dose), it failed to keep the mortality rate in check, with weekly deaths hitting an all-time high of around 28,000 halfway through May 2021. As the number of fully-vaccinated people rose, the weekly deaths finally dropped below 10,000 towards the end of June 2021. After that, a hopeful decline in deaths was seen as the number of fully vaccinated people grew steadily, reaching above 3 million at the end of December 2021 when booster doses were introduced to battle the new variants. By the end of February 2022, 3.5 million people were fully vaccinated, 826,000 people remained partially vaccinated (this number remained relatively steady throughout the months), and 139,000 people had taken the booster. However, even such impressive numbers couldn’t push the number of weekly deaths below 1000.

HDI vs total cases per million

Quality of life improvements such as frequent sanitization, social distancing, and distribution of masks is an effective way to slow the spread of a virus atleast. Thus, regions and countries with a high human development index should have an easier time dealing with the virus, but it turns out that they have higher cases and deaths per million population due to COVID-19. This is due to the international connectedness and mobility of their population related to trade and tourism, their vulnerability to older populations, and higher rates of non-communicable diseases. Countries with low HDI have low cases per million (< 100,000). The plot begins to scatter as we reach the nations with HDI higher than 0.7. All except two of them (HDI between 0.7 and 0.8) do not exceed the 200,000 cases per million mark. The outliers are Mongolia and Maldives, which suggests their unpreparedness and incompetency despite faring well pre-pandemic. Beyond HDI 0.8, the plot scatters from 21k to half a million cases per million, with some countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan living up to their HDI and others like Denmark and Iceland buckling under pressure.

Vaccine by manufacturer

As unfortunate as the pandemic has been for the world, it’d be naive to ignore the flip-side of the coin, the boom it has produced for the pharmaceutical industry. With vaccines becoming a necessity for everyone, every capable pharma entered the rat race to conquer the market. Whether they were in it for the money or goodwill, they managed to produce results. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, being American companies, produced the bulk of vaccines (> 500M) for the United States. Pfizer was the forerunner, holding a monopoly over the market of almost every first and third world country. They dished out 330M vaccines in the United States alone and around 100M in France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Moderna, although not as predominant as Pfizer, also managed to enter the market of almost every country, rolling out around 30M vaccines each in France, Germany and Italy. In the United States, they went head to head with Pfizer with a total of 210M vaccines sold. While Pfizer and Moderna battled it out for sales, Oxford/AstraZeneca left its mark on European countries and other second and third world countries, notably Argentina and South Korea. Johnson&Johnson tried their hand in the American market but were crushed by Pfizer and Moderna. Their traces also appear in Germany, South Africa, Nepal etc. but far behind the competition to make any difference. Evidently, popularity and trust was a major factor in the sales of vaccines with established pharmas selling more than their counterpart, regardless of the effectiveness in some cases.